Power Plays On, But A Man And His Magic Show Were Station`s Real

Strength

September 29, 1985|By Bill Granger.

Then Ray was a little boy, he was very shy. He never really outgrew that. Like a lot of shy little boys who grow up in the city, he pretended he was something he was not. He was attracted to the radio, to the idea of the magic behind the fabric that hid the speakers in the big old console models of his youth.

The radio was as real as a child`s imagination. The radio then was not as radio is now.

A radio station then presented an image as a theater in which one act followed another for the amusement of a vast audience that could not be seen or heard. It was a delicate image, and when it was broken, it was too shattered to ever be put together again. Television blinded the inner eye of the listener, and without that eye, radio could not be seen.

Ray pretended to be an announcer when he was a child. He would write down the racetrack results--his father enjoyed the horses--and he would be a track announcer, using a cigar box instead of a microphone, and he would broadcast the results to his pleased father.

He told me that story years later, long after he had replaced the cigar box with a real microphone. The only thing that hadn`t changed for Ray in all those years was the delicate magic of the medium he had loved since he was a boy.

In time, Ray got a job in radio, just as it was changing into another kind of thing. He worked as an announcer, he savored the shy aloneness of the studio booth, where there was only him and his voice and his imagination, and there was a microphone to somehow link him to all the waiting imaginations in an ethereal world.

There are many people in radio just like him. Some are too fat and some are too thin and some do not like the way they look or talk or walk; and all of them are shy until they reach the protection of the broadcasting studio, where they are transformed by their own imaginations into exactly what they really think they are. They are so many Cyranos whose freakish outer image contains the soul of a poet.

Ray had a big head, a vague manner, slow speech and a bad laugh, and he could be a lot of fun to be with. His enthusiasms were childlike and infectious. He eventually took over the day-to-day operations of the radio station that employed him. It had a small audience then and now; Ray preferred to call it ``select.`` ``Select`` is what doesn`t show up on the radio charts. Saying ``select`` instead of ``small`` was a way of keeping the delicate magic alive. Somehow, by the main force of imagination and a little bit of genius hidden inside a vague, cautious man, the myth of the radio station grew along with its programming guide, which was turned into a very successful monthly catalogue of conspicuous consumption.

Over the last summer, those who care about such things have read all the newspaper accounts of how Ray Nordstrand, the boss of Chicago magazine and WFMT, was pushed out of power. It happens all the time. As Nick, my favorite Italian philosopher after St. Thomas Aquinas, puts it: ``What goes around, comes around.`` People rise and people fall, particularly in corporations. Today`s boss is, inevitably, tomorrow`s firee, albeit with a golden kick out the door.

No one will have to run a tag day for Ray, but it seems someone should point out what it is that he did. When he started running WFMT, it was not written on any wall that the tiny station should become the cultural maven of the Third City or that a mystique should be glued to it that makes it more of a city treasure than a private hoard for the more boring of the city`s two public television stations.

Ray Nordstrand was the magic of what was WFMT, and that takes nothing away from all the others who worked there. He was part conman and carny barker and culture vulture, and that is why the station was not like any other; and a city that appreciates iconoclasts and hustlers took it to heart. WFMT was a magic-lantern show of the mind, just as those radio networks had been in the good old days, full of bluff and pretense, pretending to be a stage that only an imagination could see.

Ray was all wrong for modern radio: He had one foot permanently stuck in 1947--and he was frequently too cautious, often myopic, and he made WFMT what WFMT is. Like Ray, the station became something of a pompous ass in the arts. Even his friends tell the story about the time Ray was eating peanuts while the records played: A peanut caught in his throat just as the record ended, and the disturbed North Shore doyennes heard Ray coughing to clear the goober. He then announced, in the best WFMT tone: ``We had a peanut caught in our throat.``

But, like Ray, the station could even make fun of itself, endlessly broadcasting on the Saturday Midnight Special the very funny Second City parody of ``WFMFMFMT`` where ``we broadcast the best of everything